Before the 1990s, many software makers sold licenses to use a particular version of a software product. With the connectivity of the Internet, software could be updated readily by the vendor, and many software products were licensed for all updates for a major version of the product. That is, the user would have license rights to obtain and use all updates to a product until a new, major version was released. After a new release, they could continue to use the old and unsupported version or purchase an upgrade. This offered added flexibility to the consumer and vendor. The vendor could make much needed updates to fix bugs found after release and provide non-major upgrades. The consumer would get some level of new value in minor version of the product and also physically held the software to use at any time in the future. Some examples of the use of the version-based licensing model are Microsoft Windows 3.1 and Adobe Photoshop 7.0.
In the 1990s and 2000s, many software vendors began to use the approaching ubiquity of the Internet to provide subscription-based licensing, wherein the consumer pays on a time basis for access to software. In this model, the user will typically not hold the software or run it on a local machine. Instead, the software is managed and executed on centrally managed hardware by the vendor. This allows for very simple updates to the software in place in a consistent manner and will generally lower maintenance cost to the consumer and vendor. The vendor can control access to the services as welt and can provide the ability to provide feature driven pricing models for the services and particular advanced features. The negative for the consumer is generally in the loss of right and possession of the software. The model generally represents the shift from licensing rights to own the purchased software and possess it physically to a utility focused right. That is, the consumer has a right to access the service or its underlying application software interfaces (API). The consumer never possesses the software or its executable code. If the consumer stops paying for the subscription, access is withdrawn and is unavailable. Among other issues, this model did not standardize or solve the resulting issue with ownership of the consumers' data on the system. That is, when using a subscription license, how does a user retain control of the data produced or held in the subscription-based license system? If the system stores the data in the vendor's infrastructure (very typical due to efficiency), then the consumer will need some ability to extract their data from the vendor's storage. Some examples of the use of the subscription licensing model are Google GSuite, Microsoft Office 365, and Adobe Creative Cloud.
For these and many other security-related or efficiency-related aspects of distributed ledgers, cryptographic utility tokens, and devices via which they operate, a variety of technological improvements are presented below.